Monday, February 11, 2013

The Police

THE COSMOPOLITANS ON THE TROLLEY WITH OUTSIDE INFORMATION
By Kevin Shea

No one talks about interdependence, but only the luminosity of identity and the subordination of that which is unexplainable. What is this unconscious disenchantment for feeling connected to trees and rocks or the tragedy of this and its highly profitable consequences? As meandering hominids transgress cultural absolutes I hear a plethora of sea life collecting within the boob of interpretability. It's ideal to transgress the danger inherent within one's personal/cultural ideological systems. Sound is pretty innocent after all, and we all should give it a chance. While the conscious mind operates within the world of matter, the unconscious mind waits in the bedroom of an utterly lifeless and lonesome apartment for life to finally end. I believe the scrambled sounds of fate are our future, we need to heed them well and let them lead the way...we need to catch all the beauty they possess inside by resisting the temptation of individuated opinion. Epiphanies engendered after stylistic analyses perpetuate disparate value centers ripe with anomalies of forgotten interconnection. To greater and lesser degrees life's discourse only makes sense to those with the cerebral capacity to ascribe value to conspicuous objects. Were it not for our physiological make-up there would be a possibility for life devoid of formal sensory underpinnings and this would be a nirvana of empty Bruce Lee aphorisms and generalizations. Yet there are no great moments in history. The phrases “in retrospect” and “only time will tell” suggest that moments can not be understood without the gift of hindsight. Hindsight is problematic in that many times the greater the hindsight the greater the understanding. Devoid of the original translation we aren’t certain our translation is correct. Original translation required. Human beings live unconsciously according to assumption and this is why traumatic spectacles give us such victorious pleasure. It's the nearest we get to ridding our legos of their geometric über-hankerings. Humans wonder how it has all been made possible. The contemporary colonial seeks to find her explanation by wishing tragedy upon herself and her surroundings in order to understand apocalyptic chaos firsthand. Only then will she sadly realize that proximity of experience is no more real than the imagination itself. “I can’t believe it’s actually happening” as with, say, the hope that it is one’s own house that has burned down. The problem isn’t one of establishing value, but of extinguishing identity and classification at its source whereupon teleology diffuses. The question soon becomes what is “it,” what led to this disaster? The answer to this type of stupid moronic inquiry, though there is no answer, is closer to eons deep than the conventional notion of decades deep. For better or worse, life is a retreat of narcissistic revision, an equanimous process in the face of our inherent human amorality. Processes delude us into believing that we are doing something, and something is better than nothing we would like to believe. Indeed the signs are meaningless and withdrawn – though seemingly secret, actually empty. That said, whether revising oneself toward the grave or toward healthy states disembarking from latent self-loathing, each person turns out a different turn on the same general principle of mortal imprisonment. Which way does the text progress? It's hard for me to distinguish metaphor from perfect sign. There is a blurry hole where the truth should be and the man whose physical characteristics are irrelevant is so very lonesome. Without a distinct manifesto telling us exactly what we should do I see no problem making music in any way one chooses unless it's done without humility and without the process of questioning those seemingly irreproachable actions one takes for granted. Musical atrocities are inevitable. I'm less concerned about the actual sound of things and more concerned with the planned obsolescence evaporating our recording tools. Post-war people experience a complete disappearance of character because no one cares and there are no commitments. Spontaneous intuition is culpable from its very inception. Intuition coalesces as a reactionary cosmic dance precisely because of all that surrounds it and teaches it. Good music-making is not filtered through one's desires and obsessions but through a compassionate awareness that sound is its own damn free spirit who sometimes likes to be tickled on its belly during commingling. Sound is flexible and yet doesn't care to be hindered by the rampant vicissitudes of prudish holiday consumption. Deliberate transformations aren’t necessarily beneficial. Under that green skin of yours there is a robot skeleton that when lit on fire would probably explode like a nuclear bomb and then every fucking last one of us would die because of you. Are they basically a dance party band whose song forms have murdered their natural human tendencies to improvise on a day to day basis through life's many hardships and joys? Those starving to believe in “something” are the type of people that charismatic, despotic figures like Adolph Hitler gravitate towards and take advantage of because apparently the narrative is our big, dumb, fat, mustachioed gratuitous safety net. Or is that when we seem to show genuine interest in “something” it always proves to be a fleeting indulgence to pass time. Like most of their current fascist festival peers playing staged beats to bounce the corporate ass, are these instrumental parts and arrangements easy to pinpoint because they are watered down by rehearsals, or am I simply afraid to kiss them because they have syphilis? Can any amount of on-stage histrionics or loud volume or differential sound frequencies defeat the boredom of listening to an over-rehearsed band playing the same thing night after night? Perhaps you don't think it's a good idea to perpetuate an art of such theatrical sameness wherein subsequent upper and midrange frequencies rip through skulls. Perhaps you think their shows are like watching an hour-long television ad with their rehearsed lines and exploitive beats. Something that waits to be seen is how September 11th will affect our moral and psychological debility. Manhattan is a kinetic experience. Social insight haunts me. I agree with Sartre. It is a choice to believe in the importance of the human species or not. Once you feel that you have arrived in a place of authenticity you are merely suffering the same delusional principles that doctor your pragmatic consciousness -- typecast at last. Non-action is the type of action that science and technology promise the human race. Do we have no sense of devotion because it’s nothing better than any other draconian principle? Humor comes from a place of seeming emptiness, from a place of disbelief aside from a commitment to pragmatic morality and the hope not to take for granted how our choices effect other dumb ass torpid fools. The level of readability or sameness that one encounters upon deciphering a text depends partly on the narrative distinctions and merits of the text which may depend on the intention or skill of the writer. The reader must also have the skill to identify and decode the ironies and sarcasms where present, fyi. Do you come from a place of traditional spirituality where you hold your opinions as sacred over and above all else? Manifested ideas represent control. Music is a process, opinions are plastic, our foundation is a process through which we gain a broader awareness and compassion. I don't think other people are stupid boring disgusting ponces and so I don't want to take anyone who listens for granted. An ultimate goal is to create music out of kindness and to be kind by wedding disparate ideologies threaded with proficiency and questioning. We’re at Dennis Hopper’s art opening and all of us are drunk – we want you to come down -- reality based on iconoclasm. When I hear a band always play in the 4/4 time signature or a band who sounds extremely rehearsed and imbued with woeful lyrics, I think they think I am stupid, I think they are upholding traditions because they are either despotic, masochistic, or lost dorks on a jaunt to spiritual detention. Prosperity and peace, such as that which we experienced after the old war ended, leads to apathy, indifference, decadence, purposelessness and debauchery. Good music and good musicians explore sound in and of itself without feeling any responsibility to indicate melody, time, meaning, allusion, comfort, sadness, freedom, excitement etc. Sound itself has no boundaries. “Overzealous” is a criticism of passion. Knowledge can be harnessed and improved. Bands and musicians who approach music solely by seeing it only as a mating-matters-history applicable within a preset context of information-repump are boring. It’s bizarre, isn’t it asshole? Some would call this pessimism, but romanticism has its own level of pessimism or the prerequisite notion that experience has value as just being what it is. Music can mean and be whatever you want it to unless you are a ridiculously pathetic dipshit. We have a responsibility not to stringently uphold indoctrinated rules informing us how communication and meaning are to be realized, distributed, interpreted or expressed. There are nascently accepted cultural values assigned to specific time signatures, melodies, key centers, cadences, lyrics. Once we repeat chaos it becomes structured. It is a crime against humanity to negate the meaning that these values instill within others lest we nurture an indifference to other people, a narcissistic belief system played out in nationalism, fascism, conspicuous consumption. Do we really want and need to be remembered as human beings, as part of a species that places its own importance over that of the birds, bees, rocks, bunny rabbits and twigs? The application of diversity in sound is paramount to the appreciation of diversity amongst fellow beings and porpoises perhaps. Orchards blossom and lay dormant, yet our morals are inflexible – a matter of mere presumption. As always, our psychosomatic habits generate the impression that our adopted fears dominate our experience and therefore if we are inherently pragmatic creatures then art seems less a luxury and more a part of everyday life. But as soon as we step outside of our own context, whether spiritually, politically or culturally, artwork evades social improvement. Madness city sounds, crowds cheering, audience, pool hall, indoor pool, waves, crickets, people kissing. The planets swing around the sun.